Hi guys, it's Aisling, back chatting to you again on the Waterstones vlog. This
month I have three collections of short stories to talk to you about. The first
collection that I'm going to talk about is Salt Slow by Julia Armfield.
Julia is the winner of the White Review short story prize for her story The
Great Awake and this is her first collection of short stories, Salt Slow.
It's a great collection, I really enjoyed it
They mostly focus, the stories, on women's bodies sort of being othered
from themselves; whether that be you know the body changing into something that
it's not meant to be or someone sort of the losing control
over their body in a certain way, it's brilliant.
The story that actually won Julia the White Review prize, The Great
Awake was my favourite. It's a story wherein everybody in the world, they're
asleep, steps out of themselves and becomes
its own entity. Which in itself is a really, really interesting concept. And I
really enjoyed that. Her writing is very beautiful and descriptive and quite
haunting. I'd almost describe her as a non-twee Angela Carter; not that there's
anything wrong with being twee but I just think there's no pretension about
any of the kind of supernatural aspects of the stories. You know you're sort of
spoken to very matter-of-factly; but very sophisticated, very nuanced, very
elegant. I very much enjoyed these stories and I think that this is a book
that's going to be absolutely everywhere in a few months time. It comes out in May
so I would say definitely keep an eye out for her name and her book because I
think it's about to explode. The next collection that I want to recommend to
you is Being Various which is an anthology edited by Lucy Caldwell.
It's actually new Irish short stories and this is published by Faber and Faber
and I was really glad to see advance reading copies of this coming
out because the short story is such a great tradition in Ireland.
There's so many collections of short stories by
old greats like James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, Samuel Beckett; so it's so great
to see something actually new coming out now. It's very, very exciting. So there's
stories in here by Eimear McBride, Sally Rooney (who is everywhere),
Kevin Barry, who is already kind of known as one of the masters of the short story,
Kit de Wall, Nicole Flattery who actually has her own
collection of short stories coming out later this year as well, so it's great to
have one included in there and the likes of David Hayden, they're in there as well.
So I think it's a very exciting book and I'm very glad that they bringing that
out and I look forward to seeing the hardback out on the shelves in all
good book shops. This one also comes out in May so it might be a good one to you
know bring on a summer read or something. So we'll all be looking forward to that.
And then the last book that I want to recommend to you is actually already out,
so its Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin. Samanta was actually
shortlisted for the International Man Booker Prize in 2017
for her novel Fever Dream which I also read when it came out and
absolutely loved. I think it can't really be described as anything else other than
literally a fever dream, it's fantastic. But talking about her books: in the
same sort of darkly, surreal way these are fantastic stories. They are very kind
of muted, quietly full of dread. That's what I wanted to say, 'cause they're not
horror stories. When I was talking to my friend about it, they're definitely not,
but they're sort of like slow dread stories. Which I don't mean that in an
unflattering way at all. I really, really enjoyed it. I was always excited to see
where each story brought the reader. The title story Mouthful of Birds is
actually about a teenage girl whose parents are
kind of fretting and they don't know what to do with her because she has
started eating birds. And I'll just leave you with that idea because I think that
concept alone is brilliant. And you're kind of thinking what do you do with
that? How do you go from there? But it's brilliant. So I would really,
really recommend this. Especially if you are kind of more maybe into novel
reading or if you did indeed read Samantha's first novel, Fever Dream, this
is a great place to go next. But it's also... I found it was a great
page-turner. Because sometimes the problem with a short story collection
can be that it's very easy to park your bookmark in there and kind of never
return. That's also plus for short story collections as well, I guess, that you can
do that. But this is great, kept me reading to the very end and I was always
very excited to see what the outcome of each story was, so I would recommend that
to everyone. So those were my three recommendations for you guys this month
and I'll be back chatting to you again very very soon. Okay, thanks, bye guys.